Three years ago I lost my college friend Mike, and last week Facebook cheerfully reminded me it was his birthday. For about five seconds I actually considered clicking “say happy birthday” before remembering he’s been dead since 2021. That little moment of confusion? It messed me up more than I expected.
Mike’s social media accounts are still out there, doing their thing like he never left. His Twitter shows up in my “people you may know” suggestions. His Instagram stories from three years ago still play when I accidentally click on his profile. Amazon keeps recommending products based on his purchase history, and his beer blog continues getting spam comments about crypto and weight loss pills. It’s like he’s simultaneously gone forever and also weirdly still here, frozen in digital amber.
This whole thing has been bothering me way more than it probably should. Maybe it’s because I’m 48 and watching how death has changed since I was a kid. When my grandmother died in 1995, she left behind photo albums and letters – physical things that would eventually fade or get lost in someone’s attic. Mike left behind terabytes of data that will apparently outlive all of us.
The numbers are honestly creepy when you think about it. Facebook has something like 30 million profiles belonging to dead people, and they estimate that by 2070 there will be more dead users than living ones on the platform. We’re accidentally creating the world’s largest digital cemetery, and nobody really planned for this.
When my friend Sarah’s mom died suddenly two years ago, she discovered just how complicated this gets. Her mom’s phone was password protected, her email was locked, her banking apps were inaccessible. Sarah could see notifications coming in – important-looking messages, photo memories, even bills – but couldn’t access any of it. She spent months dealing with customer service reps who had no idea how to help someone gain access to a dead person’s digital life. It was like her mom’s entire online existence became a museum she could look at but never enter.
That experience scared me enough to create what Rob calls my “death folder” – a document with all my passwords, instructions for my accounts, and specific directions about what should be deleted versus what should be saved. Emma thinks it’s morbid, but I think it’s practical. I don’t want my family dealing with my digital mess while they’re grieving.
The social rules around this stuff are still being figured out, and honestly they’re weird. Is it okay to tag dead people in photos? Should you leave their LinkedIn profile active? What about dating apps – should families even know those exist? There’s no rulebook for posthumous internet etiquette, so everyone’s just making it up as they go.
I’ve seen families handle it different ways. Some turn Facebook profiles into memorial pages where people share memories and photos. Others quietly delete everything because they find it too painful. Some just leave accounts sitting there, frozen at the moment of death like digital time capsules. Each approach says something different about how we deal with grief in an age when everything leaves a permanent record.
Working in education, I’ve sat through exactly one meeting about what happens when students die – which, unfortunately, does happen. The discussion lasted maybe twenty minutes and ended with someone adding a “memorialize account” button to the settings. We spent more time debating the color of buttons than we did thinking about dead users. It felt wrong then and it feels wrong now.
The tech industry is terrible at dealing with death because they’re designed for engagement, not disengagement. Dead people don’t click ads or buy products, so they’re edge cases to be handled with minimal effort. The result is absurd – fitness apps sending workout reminders to dead people, travel sites advertising vacation deals to empty email accounts, social media algorithms trying to re-engage users who will never log in again.
This raises questions I’m not smart enough to answer. When our tweets and photos outlive us, is that a form of immortality or just digital littering? Are these preserved accounts helping people grieve or making it harder to move on? I asked this at a dinner party last month and Rob said it was the most depressing conversation we’d ever hosted. Fair point, but I can’t stop thinking about it.
The answers vary wildly depending on who you ask. My friend Dave wants everything deleted when he dies – “I don’t want to haunt the internet,” he says. My sister thinks our digital presence should live on as a gift to future generations. These are fundamentally different views of what it means to exist online versus exist in real life.
There are companies now that claim they can create chatbots based on someone’s digital footprint – essentially building AI versions of dead people that their families can talk to. The technology exists to analyze years of text messages, emails, and social media posts to create a bot that theoretically responds like the deceased person would have. I find this simultaneously fascinating and horrifying. Would talking to an AI version of Mike help me process his death or make it worse? I honestly don’t know.
The permanence of digital life versus the temporary nature of biological life is something we’re not prepared for. My kids will inherit not just my physical possessions but also my email archives, photo libraries, and social media history. Their great-grandchildren might Google my name and find my tweets from 2015. That version of me – curated, performative, incomplete – might be how future generations know me.
This realization has made me more conscious of what I post online. If Emma’s kids someday scroll through my Facebook posts, what will they think I was like? Will they see the real me or just the version I performed for social media? The gap between our documented lives and our actual lives is huge, but the documented version might be all that survives.
People are finding creative ways to cope with digital remains. One of my former students still texts her dad’s old phone number as a way of processing grief. Another friend posts Instagram stories “to” her deceased grandmother. These practices would have seemed insane twenty years ago, but now they’re becoming normal ways to maintain connection with people who are gone.
I’ve started being more intentional about my own digital legacy. I download important photos and save them in multiple places my family can access. I’ve written instructions for which accounts should be memorialized and which should be deleted. I’ve even drafted a final social media post for Rob to publish when I die, which feels both practical and incredibly weird.
But mostly I’m just trying to accept that digital death is different from physical death in ways we’re still figuring out. There will always be embarrassing posts, forgotten accounts, and incomplete projects floating around after we’re gone. Our ability to control our online presence ends the moment we do, and everything after that is up to other people.
So if you’re reading this and I’ve recently died, please ignore any weird posts my abandoned accounts might be making. Feel free to wish me happy birthday on Facebook – my digital ghost probably appreciates it, even if it can’t respond. Just remember that the real me was messier, funnier, and more complicated than whatever my internet footprint suggests. The online version was just the preview, not the whole story.
Brenda’s a Minneapolis teacher and mom trying to raise kids in a world glued to devices. Her posts mix honesty, guilt, and humor as she navigates parenting, teaching, and losing daily battles against technology. She’s not a technophobe—just a realist with Wi-Fi exhaustion.
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